“Where would you want to go?”

“I don’t know. Once I wanted to go to Capetown. There are mixed-blood people there, the Cape Coloreds. I thought I would go there and be one of them, but they seem to have the same problem, only it’s worse for them because the whole country is so involved with race. Perhaps you will take me back to America.”

I wasn’t sure that was the answer, but neither was sending her home again. And I couldn’t really see how it would be that much more dangerous for her to come along. We would just drive up into the interior of Modonoland far enough to establish that Bowman and Knanda Ndoro were with their ancestors. If there was any sign that Ndoro’s treasure still existed, maybe we would have a shot at it. If not, we would find a border and get over it and find civilization and think of someplace to go next. There would be a certain amount of adventure, but that was what we were all here for. But there shouldn’t be much in the way of danger.

Ha.

Chalk it up to shock – the burial bit, the madmen with their cattle bones, the rain and the chill. Or write it off as the system’s tolerance for terror; after all the various anxieties I had suffered in the past few hours, nothing as far away as the remote Modonoland hinterlands held any fear for me. Besides, I was the Corpse That Walked. You can’t kill a dead man, so what was there for me to be afraid of?

I drove through the geometrical precision of suburban streets until I came to the highway running northwest out of the city. I turned obliquely into it and held the car at a steady eighty kilometers an hour. Almost at once the suburban pattern thinned out and gave way to stretches of open farmland with houses few and far between. It began raining again. I hoped I hadn’t ripped out the wiper system. I hadn’t. They worked, flipping hypnotically back and forth. They didn’t keep the windshield clean, but they did their best.

Plum sighed occasionally in her sleep, and made little purring noises. She shifted in her seat and wound up with her head against my shoulder, her little body curled up beside me. In sleep her face looked even younger and more completely innocent than it did when she was awake. I put a paternal arm around her. I thought of Minna, I thought of Kitty. I removed the arm and kept both hands on the wheel.

I went on driving. The rain stopped again, and shortly thereafter the sky lightened up and dawn broke rather abruptly. I thought about food. At first I just sort of thought about it, as one will, and then it began to become an obsession. I thought about the last meal I had eaten, and calculated the number of hours that had elapsed since then, and remembered the ingredients of that last meal, and compared it with other meals, and began to consider all of the meals I had eaten over the course of my life, and remembered what one after another of them had tasted like, the appearance and aroma of the various foods. I thought of the cheese and the ham sandwich which I had abandoned in the coffin. I cursed myself for abandoning them. I devised plans for returning to the grave and digging them up again. I was not wholly irrational – I knew that this was absurd, but I was driving on a dull road with nothing to do but think, and my body was determined that those thoughts would concern food, since that was what it wanted, and there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it.

I knew very well that this was foolish. The human body can easily go a month without food. I have occasionally fasted for three or four days at a time for one reason or another, and while there are things I would rather do, it’s painless and harmless. You just need the right mental attitude, that’s all. And that was the one thing I didn’t have now. The human body can go a month without food, but the human mind isn’t that reasonable.

I looked at Plum and wondered if she was as hungry as I was. She was asleep, and thus didn’t know if she was hungry or not. I wished her name didn’t happen to be the name of a sort of food. I looked at her shoulder. It was the color of a toasted English muffin. I found myself wondering what human flesh tasted like.

Plum went right on sleeping. The sun came up and blazed through her window without waking her. She didn’t wake up until we ran out of gas.

This was somewhat less surprising than it may sound. It will happen to any car if you drive it long enough without filling the tank, and on a road totally lacking in filling stations it’s just a question of time. Or miles, more precisely. The VW was a recent enough model to possess a gas gauge, and for the past couple of hours I had watched the needle hover closer and closer to the big E. Eventually it touched the E with no discernible decline in performance, and I had just about decided that the blessed bug would run without gas when it coughed dryly, uttered a droll belch, and quit on me. I popped it into neutral and managed to coast to the crest of a slight rise, passed the crest, and rolled on for about a half mile. It did this rather well, but it finally stopped, as everything does, and Plum woke up and asked where we were and why we had stopped. I told her, and she said that was nice. She wasn’t asleep, but she wasn’t exactly awake, either.

“Almost two hundred miles,” I said. “That’s not bad at all, really.”

“Perhaps we can stop another car and get more petrol.”

“There aren’t any other cars. I haven’t seen another car in a hundred miles.” I cleared my throat. “I don’t understand it, actually. The road is flat and wide and perfectly paved, and it doesn’t look as though there’s ever been another car on it.”

“Perhaps we are the first.”

“It certainly looks that way.”

“You see, the road does not go anywhere, Evan.”

“Huh?”

“The Retriever built it. Knanda Ndoro. Your country and many others gave him much money, and he built things throughout the nation for the glory of Modonoland.”

“I thought he just kept the money.”

“Some he spent on the country. There were beautification projects and modernization projects and improvement projects and, oh, many projects. You know the cultural museum in the square? This was built with aid from the Soviet Union.”

“There’s no roof on it,” I said.

“There was not enough money to complete it.”

“Oh.”

“And this road, it was built with money from your country. It extends to the Congo border. But there is nothing there, you see. Just jungle. It was hoped that the government of the Congo would build a road to join up with it, but they replied that no one really wished to drive from the Congo to Modonoland anyway, or from Modonoland to the Congo, and so the road simply goes to the border and stops.”

“Just like that.”

“Yes.”

“It must have cost millions.”

“I think it did.”

“And the U.S. gave you the money?”

“Yes. Knanda Ndoro announced that if he did not get the funds from you, then he would accept them from Communist China.”

“Oh, well,” I said. “We had no choice, did we?”

We left the car and set out along the road. It was concrete, but it should have been yellow brick. I felt like one of Dorothy’s chums en route to the Emerald City. The Cowardly Lion, I decided, because the others never got hungry.

A ways down the road we saw a few columns of smoke off to the left. We found a path cutting off in that direction and took it. The terrain was rather attractive, with high savanna grasses interrupted by an occasional squat palm tree. The grass was shoulder high on me and came to the top of Plum ’s head.

The path led to a clearing where a scattering of geometrically precise huts circled a common cooking fire. Women squatted on their haunches around the fire baking bread. There didn’t seem to be any men around.

“You know the language,” I said to Plum. “See what you can do.”

The hell she knew the language. It turned out that she knew English and Swahili and Modono. So did I. So didn’t the women; they spoke a pleasant-sounding singsong dialect without a single recognizable word in it. Plum looked at me and shrugged.